Chinese engineer makes own robot wife to get parents off his back

Jiajia Zhang has had a pretty good life so far. With a master’s degree from Zhejiang University where he studied artificial intelligence, Zhang joined up with the successful smartphone manufacturer Huawei. From there he started up his own robotics firm.

With that killer combination of brains, achievements, and even a sense of humor to boot, you’d think Zhang would be a hit with the ladies. But unfortunately, cursed with an unbalanced, XY-choromosome-heavy population in China, early male pattern baldness, and a general sense of awkwardness around women, the 31-year-old can’t seem to meet the right woman.

And like single thirty-somethings all over the world, he also has a pair of parents breathing down his neck asking, “Isn’t it time you settled down and got married?” Feeling trapped, the engineer decided to tackle his romantic problems the only way he knows how: robots!

Thus, Yingying was born. This bionic wife has lifelike skin, generates warmth, and can respond to speech and hugs. However, the only movement she appears capable of is from the neck up.

The reason Yingying is wearing a red cloth is because it is the traditional headwear of a bride in China. That is because Zhang and Yingying tied the knot in March of this year at a ceremony which his mother attended. However the marriage is not considered legal for obvious reasons.

The newlywed couple appeared on Chinese variety program Are You Hot where they showed an example of a typical morning conversation.

Yingying: “Good morning, get up.”Zhang: “I’m up. I’m up.”Yingying: “Let’s have breakfast!”Zhang: “Sure thing.”Yingying: “Hey, can you take me for a walk?”Zhang: “Sure, sure, let’s go to the lake.”

They certainly sound like newlyweds, don’t they? But robotic or not, I give them a few years before that delightful exchange devolves into:

Yingying: “Your ass is still in bed?”Zhang: “Yeah, it’s Saturday. What’s it to you?”Yingying: “You don’t remember, do you?”Zhang: “Remember what?”Yingying: “If you don’t remember then I’m not telling you.”Zhang: “Well, maybe I’d remember if I wasn’t out working my butt off all week to put food on the table!”Yingying: “Yeah, out with those robot sluts?”Zhang: “Hey! You knew what I did when I built you!”

Actually, during the program, someone asked Zhang what he thought was missing from Yingying, to which he replied, “A beating heart.”

When those words touched my stereotypically male ears, I thought to myself, “Well yeah, I suppose that would be a design issue that needed to be ironed out along the way.” However, my colleague Meg’s reaction was more like, “Awwww, that’s so sweet. Of course, he needs the trust and validation of a living person to achieve true love. I really hope he finds someone.”

Then it all made perfect sense.

Of course, Zhang doesn’t want to spend the rest of his life with that robot. I’m not sure if objectifying machines with artificial intelligence is cool or not, but I’d say Yingying’s a six at best and has the personality of Siri. However, marrying her has propelled Zhang into the public spotlight as an available young go-getter for women of the entire world to see.

This would explain why his mother signed off on the whole thing, and it certainly doesn’t hurt that the publicity is just what his robotics company would need to get off the ground. Zhang’s plan to manipulate the global media is inspiring in its cleverness and deftly avoids the far more grueling hardship of introducing yourself to strangers.